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Style Matters in Leadership – published on the Sarbanes-Oxley Journal under Articles – Thought Leader.  - September 8, 2005

In 2005, I wrote this article mainly in response to the numerous corporate scandals that had been exposed due to accounting irregularities.  Those events generated laws (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, updates to the Whistle Blower laws) and restrictions (NYSE, NASDAQ etc) on corporate behavior that has quieted much of the debate.  Know I’m returning to this article to suggest that the some of the tactics that I suggested to Boards of Directors then – leadership in transforming their corporate culture – tasking the executive team with the transformation process and the Board’s on going monitoring of the process – should now be maintained or expanded in response to the opportunities available due to social media applications.  The primary reason is that now the information regarding corporate behavior can be attacked or supported from so many different sources and angles that just hoping to hover beneath surface of the public’s attention misses many of the profits that are available.   The end product is still the same – transform the organization to one that takes its presence in the public space serious is one that gives its “voice” serious thought and action.

Codes of conduct have become the norm for public companies. Pursuant to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, public companies must disclose whether or not they have a code of ethics for their principal executive, financial, and accounting officers and must disclose amendments and waivers to this code of ethics on a Form 8-K or on their websites. Similarly, the NYSE and NASDAQ listing standards require prompt disclosure of waivers of the code of conduct for any director or executive officer. Organizations that rate corporate governance inquire if one exists. Most companies view the code of conduct as an important component of the internal control system. However, simply having one is not enough. A code of conduct is an integral part of an effective compliance and ethics program, but it is not the only part.

Despite the Supreme Court ruling that compliance programs under the federal sentencing guidelines are only “advisory”, the crux of the new rules established by the SEC still require ?standards of conduct and internal control systems that are reasonably capable of reducing the likelihood of violations of law.? For the purpose of this article, we have assumed the position that cultural changes produce effective results for eliminating the behavior sighted in the violation(s). The specific areas that matter most to us are those that tend to impact an organization’s ‘voice’. The information flows to the public effect its “reputation”. In this context, voice is the method by which the firm’s customers or organizational members express their dissatisfaction directly to management, to some other authority to which management is subordinated, or through general protest addressed to anyone who cares to listen.

Of course the questions are many, but these should be on the agenda:

• How much time and money is required to implement a cultural program of such magnitude?
• Have such tactics proven successful? And finally,
• Does the evidence produced convince a typical board of directors that it should adopt such a program as its preferred method of compliance?

This article is much less about the full elaboration of all the twist and turns of a complete program than a focus on styles for leadership to be used in the execution of a fully designed program.

Behavior vs. Documentation
Sarbanes-Oxley continues to push organizational behavior along the path that demands public companies become increasingly more transparent to society. The recent trials of executives have demonstrated that a shift in organizational behaviors, not one in pronouncements, is the standard preferred by both civil society and prosecutors alike. In other words, it’s about what is being done by people that gets exposed by other people within the same organization, not after the fact testimony and public relation tactics that carry the day.

Ideally, a company will never find itself in the position of facing sentencing for corporate wrongdoing, but if it does, an effective compliance and ethics program is a mitigating factor that could reduce the ultimate penalty a company has to pay with respect to specific governmental fines and sanctions. — A clear benefit to the organization. The absence of an effective program may lead a court to place a company on probation and the implementation of an effective program may be a condition of its probation. Also, an effective compliance program may limit the risk of aiding and abetting liability in private litigation by uncovering, correcting and preventing misconduct.

Disclosing wrongdoing either directly or indirectly on the part of one’s employer, commonly known as “whistleblowing,” is one of the most difficult decisions that a staff person will have to make. The board has to blend that reality with the same rigor of perspective it has for the competitive demands of the global market place — reputation. We are assuming that those two realities vie for prominence within a governance model adopted by a typical board of directors.

The definition of a compliance program is to direct information flows out to all employees and other concerned publics that establish an individual’s obligation as to any suspected violations (covering fraud, anti-trust, discrimination and insider-trading, to name a few) and the methods and tools that are available (i.e. telephone hotline, website, normal reporting channels or if available, the business unit’s Compliance Officer or Ombudsman) to resolve it. The very scope of such a program requires the board to think about transforming both themselves as well as the organization.

One of the consequences of making this shift is more exposure and transparency. Access and openness make it harder to get away with unethical behavior, which the board and the public both demand. Job descriptions are being tuned, with a view to the type of person rather than simply the tasks. It is not just what the employee can do, but the kind of person he or she is, ethically and morally.

Transparency, Transformation, & Trust
Transparency is to transformation as water is to soil. Transformation thrives in the tension generated by the paradox of creativity — the creative process, the making of the new, involves destruction of the old as the old is the very antithesis of what creativity symbolizes. Creativity’s affect on transformation is seen in how it destroys asymmetrical information barriers - opening up a space that will bare the mass of transforming practices toward greater transparency.

The tension within transparency can be seen in the following views:

• One party believes that another group is inherently dangerous, and that its potential to do harm is exacerbated by secrecy. Therefore, accountability must be forced upon that group through the enhanced flow of information.
• Another party argues that some vital good will be threatened by heightened candor, hence wants the proposed data flow shut down.

What is the behavior of transformation?

• Policy alignment as evidence of trustworthiness
• Examples focused on revelation and development
• Installation of practices to verify and celebrate demonstrated behaviors
• Integrate short term achievement and honors

Trusted is one of those titles that companies aspire. Many of the business scandals in the past 10 years - such as Enron, WorldCom, ImClone, and Tyco — would have met with a much different reception fifty or one hundred years ago. Today many boards are alarmed since so many more concerned stakeholders can make their views known for affect. Being trusted offers great premium in both labor markets and civil society in general. So the reputation as an ethical culture lives or dies every day when someone chooses either to speak up or to remain silent. The consequences of not speaking up, however, are now more significant.

The glue of trust is what maintains society — people with the capacity to confront mistrust. The health of a society can be measured by how openly people are able to confront problems with each other. The degree that problems are allowed to fester demonstrates the erosion within trust and many benefits of community are lost. Disclosure has become the watchword of our age. In all of history, we have found just one cure for error; a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.

Behavior - A Product of Culture
In the heavily automated workplace, a keen sense of right and wrong has become and is increasingly being valued as a job skill. The “great global brain drain” is how futurist Richard Samson describes it. As the century progresses, he predicts, more and more jobs will become automated, forcing humans to hone skills machines can’t duplicate. Qualities like creativity, ethical judgment, compassion, and intuition, as well as responsibility, stand out in an automated world now and increasingly so.

What is apparent, however, is that the ripple effect of unethical behavior will become more acute. “As computer systems make our work increasingly interconnected, so the chance for one unethical or incompetent person to do tremendous damage will increase,” says David De Long, author of Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce.

Relational knowledge, the “know-who” rather than the know-how, has become more critical from a board’s perspective in regards to how it establishes its oversight of technology systems and staffing directions. Organizational executive information flows are becoming more fluid and decentralized as huge numbers of people have enough information to make intelligent decisions and choices for themselves and networks are so highly integrated. This exposure might peak the board to maximize its corporate reputation by managing internal culture and its ‘voice’ to the public. De Long states –”We’re in the early stages of an increase in human freedom in business that may in the long run be as important a change for business as the change to democracies was for governments.”

What behavior is subject to ethical question?

• Transactions that promote cognitively counter-stated behavioral goals
• Behavior that highlights cover-ups and avoidance instead of openness
• Tactics that promote a stand of deniability

If there is a recognizable problem in your organization (a legal crisis, lowered productivity, or a product quality issue), do you ignore it? Of course not! But in many companies an unacknowledged danger of equal or greater proportion threatens not only profits, but overall corporate health. That danger is the disparity between the standards articulated by a company (in a code of conduct, policies, and procedures) and the behavior of its employees. This disparity erodes integrity, undermines even the best-laid standards and allows unethical behavior to become the de facto norm. With loss of integrity comes increased financial and reputational risk, making an organization vulnerable in terms of legal liabilities and declining consumer and investor confidence. Yet the source of this risk is often ignored or unrecognized.

The problem is with behavior, not standards. Setting standards is the easy part. Most companies have a code of ethics. Some of the larger firms provide compliance training. However in many corporate reform efforts, the focus has been on developing standards without equal emphasis on communicating and modeling the behaviors that demonstrate those standards.

The root of the problem is often a misunderstanding by an organization’s leaders of the relationship between standards and behavior. Leaders may believe, for example, that because it has established a set of rules, employees will naturally follow them, or even worse, not establish a code because they believe that all the people they have hired are honest and do not need any training . The reality is that making rules is only a first step, and that standards alone cannot guarantee integrity.

The critical element necessary to address the problem is a company’s control environment, the foundation of the corporate culture. The control environment is the context in which decisions are made and sets the tone for the entire organization in a market place of expanding horizons. It is comprised of the attitudes, abilities, awareness, and actions of a company’s employees, especially its leaders, and the responses those behaviors generate in the wider civil society. The measure of reputation runs from the individually-affected employee, pass the host communities, and pass the customer to the investment world and its networks. In order to understand how the control environment affects behavior, it is important to understand the importance of context. Ethical (or unethical) behavior does not exist in a vacuum, but is part of a broader organizational culture.

Older models of organizations focused on individual behavior. It was assumed that an employee’s natural inclination was to act only in his or her self-interest, and therefore needed close monitoring; as if the organization’s actions were hidden from exposure. More contemporary and inclusive thinking focuses on the environment in which individuals and organizations act. Even good people are susceptible to negative environmental influences. In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell discusses what he calls the power of context in terms of students cheating on school exams. Some students, he found, will never cheat. Others will always try to get a dishonest edge. But the vast majority — the largest section of the bell curve of the class — will cheat or not cheat as the classroom environment (their “control environment”) dictates. Little supervision and no perceived punishment, for example, will encourage more students to copy answers off their peers’ papers, while the opposite conditions seem to compel what we would call honesty. Clearly a trait that we may have believed is part of a person’s innate character is influenced by context.

Corporate Culture as a Risk Factor
Weaknesses in a corporate culture or control environment increase risk. The absence of strong leadership in an organization will result in a lack of role models for the organization’s employees. If leaders do not “walk the talk” and model the desired behavior, then they are expecting employees to behave appropriately as the byproduct of a ‘wish’, not the product of program that achieves compliance. Lack of transformative leadership may also be manifest in a lack of vision. The dearth of a clear vision of organization goals and proper ethical practices increase the gap between standards and behavior. Without vision it is difficult to set appropriate standards — rules for behavior that are neither too high and thus discouraging, nor too low and not challenging for employees. Leaders who cannot communicate and demonstrate a commitment to integrity cannot possibly instill it in others.

The key is to focus on two elements. First, an organization’s leaders must identify their stance toward the specific risk factors that create or widen the gap between desired and undesired behavior. Then the organization must test its capacity to execute a plan to mitigate and manage those risk factors. As with any other business goal, leaders must face this threat with a sure vision, strategic planning, and a commitment to change. In order to really affect behavior, leaders need to commit first to a goal of execution and then to a process of continuous improvement toward the goal.

Leaders must also establish processes, tools, communication, and ongoing education to support the organization’s goal. Creating a rule book will not suffice, nor will any other “quick fix” approach. Only by accepting the ongoing nature of this challenge can organizations bring employee behavior in line with the organization’s standards.

The benefits of shifting behavior are threefold:

• Improved financial outlook
• Affirmed reputation
• Authentic effectiveness in an increasingly competitive workplace

In summary, bringing employee behavior closer in line with organization ethics greatly reduces the financial risks associated with unethical behavior. An organization will benefit by avoiding punitive fines in the short term. Shifted behavior provides protection against declining stock values. An organization earns affirmation of public perception. A company that demonstrates a commitment to integrity and plays fair within its field is a company that will be trusted by the public and investors.

Leadership is the Key
It is the responsibility of leaders to bring about this shift in behavior by having both a vision of integrity for the organization and a strategic plan for ensuring such integrity. This vision must be articulated in a way that is relevant and actionable by employees. A vision that aims too high will not be taken seriously while one that is too pedestrian will not motivate employees.

With the spectacle of court TV to avoid, what should a board of directors use to generate a proper picture? The style (or stance) of leadership the board wants to promote demonstrates a capacity to energize subordinates and the public to believe that the organization has risen above its singular contractual obligations and performs at the level for mutual benefit of civil society and stakeholder.

The principal finding of a McKinsey Quarterly survey of more than 1,000 board members is that having focused for a time on accounting-compliance issues, boards are now determined to play an active role in setting the strategy, assessing the risks, developing the leaders, and monitoring the long-term health of their companies.

At one level, the survey underlines the way the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is holding boards’ not only in the United States, but also around the world more responsible for meeting high standards in reporting and controlling the financial affairs of their companies. Yet the implications for governance are even far more reaching. To achieve as much involvement as directors say they want, they will have to use their time in meetings more effectively and develop a new understanding of their roles and responsibilities; otherwise, they will give management the impression they intend to take on day-to-day roles. Moreover, the composition and culture of boards, as well as the agendas of board meetings, will require fresh thinking.

Understanding and choosing the style of leadership necessary to create the desired environment for the organization begins with understanding the various leadership roles available to organizations today.

Leadership as Management: Developed by Friedrich Taylor, this is a managerial role that asks leaders to ensure group activity is timed, controlled, and predictable. This mind-set says little, if anything, about the leadership task of building shared values, trust, and vision. It is silent about the animating essence of business and business people. By relegating workers to the status of ‘cogs’ in the corporate machine, it has scant appeal to the better educated, more aware, and ever-more-wanting people entering the workplace. The need to be rapidly responsive to changes in customer demand for products and services places a strain on the rigid, procedural, control mechanisms developed by this managerial mind-set — to produce traditional outputs with multiple units of the same product to high tolerances and low margins.

Leadership as Excellent (good) Management: This view of leadership, while maintaining the mechanistic operational inclination of the firm, changes the character of the core follower (responding to the pull of the quality movement) and enlarges the domain of the manager. Essentially it retains the idea that leaders and managers do much the same thing. It limits the scope of leadership to just one function — quality improvements — and ignores the full range of capacities of both leader and follower. It does not address the needs of the corporation beyond a focus on high quality.

Values Leadership: This conception of leadership is rooted in the reality of human nature and conduct. The essential human nature is simple; everyone has values and these values trigger behavior. Even as it recognizes the use and importance of values in shaping behavior, out of a false desire to let each person choose their own values, it refrains from advocating any values or even discussing relative merits of alternative value systems. Indeed, it teaches that any value is equal to any other. So it recognizes that values are shaping our lives but fails to address that we do not know how to consciously set our own values systems or evaluate the merits or results of those we see in others. Values leadership clearly has set aside a space to articulate values but seems too timid and unsure to make full use of the space.

Trust Leadership: This view sees its role not so much as a function of the individual leader but as a condition of the group culture. Leadership may be spontaneous at times. Most often, it is a result of specific, planned actions to create a culture conducive to internal harmony and interpersonal trust. The leader’s task is to build a culture of shared values where people can come to trust each other enough to sublimate their differing values so that they can work together. Those accepting this leadership reality see the need for a unified, effective, harmonious culture characterized by mutual trust that allows leadership to take place. It is a collective activity, shaped and controlled by the values-laden notion of harmony as defined by its history of domination by the majority culture. Without a broad and adroit set of critical skills, the trust leader’s search for unity will tend to exclude many important insights, tactics and especially people. This view is likely to accept conformity as consensus or, even worse; it needs conformity and needs to call it consensus.

Spiritual Leadership: This view concludes that leadership is a function of the leader’s concern for the whole-soul — the inner sense of spirituality of self and others. The belief is that leadership comes out of the leader’s true self — his/her inner spiritual core. This inner framework, not facts or situation, determines what is good and true and beautiful, and therefore worthy of action. From this view, the notion of only looking at profit and productivity is unsatisfying as the guiding values focus on feeding the soul. It presumes that people are hungry for meaning in their lives and feel lost and empty. To fill this void, it attempts to blend an internal representation of the soul and the firm’s economic needs. This view represents one of the oldest of rationales in Western culture, that of Emanuel Kant. It understates the social value of being the best for an external customer in favor of the inner most space of the internal market — the soul. It may be true that the key operation is metaphysical but to link to a unified soul denies the multiplicity of the forces in action. What this view is especially good at is focusing all of its attention of an empowering relationship. A leader of a metaphysical experience defines a sense of one’s own spirituality and that of co-workers so as to have a greater transformational effect on the organization, its forms, structures and processes.

Contextual Leadership: This view is a celebration of ‘maturity’. Contextualism is a view of life that takes seriously the idea of maturity — a wide base of knowledge and a life filled with challenge. Maturity expresses a commitment to courageously choose to define and protect ones social space in the presence of hostile forces while maintaining an adroit process of self-criticism and accountability for those choices. A wide base of knowledge infers more than a mere accumulation of data but rather an ongoing quest to be conversant with the many discourses and varied articulations they entail. Challenge-filled refers to a belief in a bursting forth of possibilities. This belief in open possibilities, limited by responsibility, explains the relationship between management and contextual leadership. Simply put, contextual leadership calls into question the very core of historical management rationale that emphasize rules, universality, and impartiality over contingent ways of reasoning that emphasize relationships, particularity, and partiality. Most management systems seek to transcend the individual. Contextual leadership delights in the play of unfixedness, incompleteness, and temporality. From this view, the spectacle of the open forum represents the true reality of our time. All other versions of reality that call for the unity, objectivity, or a wholeness of social bodies as presupposed in most management systems, are systems used for domination and repression.

Style Creates Context
Each leadership style brings distinct philosophies and value systems to the practice of operating and leading an organization yet they all fail to address the experience of the leaders themselves. We believe that the keys to effectively leading transformational activities in an organization are first to recognize one’s own leadership style along with its strengths and weaknesses. Second, to identify the likely opportunities and issues created within the organization’s culture and its ability to be transparent and effective in and for society associated with that leadership style. And finally, to develop a point of reference, or ‘place to stand,’ that allows leaders to act with confidence and consistency.

While the activities of transforming the ethical and compliance culture of an organization are important, fundamentally, the approach leaders take to demonstrate integrity and transparency will determine what the real cultural context will be.

It’s Up to You
Your leadership, its style and basis, create the context for the organization and guide the development and evolution of your organization’s culture in powerful and far reaching ways. As leaders, it is easy to become consumed by the day-to-day activities required by our roles within the organization. Meetings, clients, staff, and those we report to, all place demands for time and attention. Without the ability to create space for reflection and purposeful preparation, we simply lead based upon our historical experience of other leaders or, even worse, simply take as a given the historical culture of our organizations. While this may have been adequate in the past, the dynamics and demands of modern social expectations and the heightened expectations of compliance and oversight systems make that approach inadequate for the future. Whether you exercise your leadership as part of a Board of Directors, as a C-level executive, or as a leader responsible for a segment of an organization, you, more than any other person, have the ability to create a powerful context and culture that celebrates transparency, receives and demonstrates trust, and effectively guides employees as they make the myriad daily decisions necessary to grow and evolve your organization. Ultimately, compliance and risk management is a product of the choices made by individuals. Their guide through this minefield of temptations and challenges is the cultural context you have established supported by the policies, practices, and resources available to them.

Recently I’ve taken a closer look at Coaching. Talk about Sports and Executive Coaching practices being different. Career, Culture or Learning all making claims for this strategy of Coaching or that. Every time I come across a discussion I am inspired to ask why maintain such closed ranks - open up. People need coaching of all types - if there was only a lively market place like the Greek Forum of old, where conversations could be over heard on different whys to happiness, success, self actualization and other heady subjects, then more consumer’s could demonstrate a more efficient choice therefore the market demand Coaching would produce higher value and more units of activity.

So what would such a market place hold as its ethic - why endure democratization of ideologies in an ready fragment Coaching market - simple, you don’t. There has to be implicit structure. The participants have to begin by maintaining a open source stance from a software and well as technique perspective. The same rules that apply online.

Phronêsis

Greek: a characteristic of someone who knows what is due him and takes pride in claiming his due – practical judgment

Phronêsis Network is an outgrowth from the experiences gained and philosophical paths taken over 35 years of diversified consulting practice of Levy N Rivers. The Network’s purpose is to provide access, insights and coaching to the entrepreneur, marketer, “wonderer” and leader in search of a community of like travelers where their sensibilities can find satisfaction.

What was once a rare phenomenon – talented, energetic, knowledgeable yet unattached (“unemployable”) individual – is know a common feature of our time. Unemployable use to have a connotation of undesirable, but now it relates to people that find the corporate thing to restrictive, unfulfilling or simply unavailable because any number of rationales (future of work).

Not to limited the scope of the Network’s reach, it is also will provide a service to those new or challenged in the process of self actualization or career enhancement. The open space offered in a non-sectarian community means that each coach is encouraged to bring a full array of talents for consumption by marketing engine of the Network provides.

Who should use this service!

The mentoring, training, and knowledge exchange that once constituted the cultural context created by the seasoned vet schooling the rookie no longer exist in the bountiful ways it once did. Firms on their own recognize the importance of these transfers, but have eschewed the expense of these exact workers in their quest to reduce overhead. The Phronêsis Network has been designed to fill this void. Our sliver of the market is designed as a compliment to whatever activities they internally generate. The firm will find both experience transfers, but also time/leadership/decision making skill development.

Build a coherent Cohort

To the ancient Greeks “phronêsis” represented the ultimate virtue. “Phronêsis” depicted a sense of innate pride in one’s potential and one’s insistence on achieving it. “Phronêsis” also reflected the pride of acknowledgment held within one’s community of peers and colleagues in regards to its members’ achievements.

“Claiming one’s due” is most effective when it is done through actions – actions which reflect the ideas of an emboldened community confronting the realities of the dynamic and demanding market place - the central metaphor of our lives .

The Phronêsis Network will work best when a synergy is achieved between each mentor and protégé who have taken the research, analysis; planning and implementation to the level of “story” (place a link here to a glossary).

To accomplish these three goals: 1) post corporate, early stage, or after care support themes must be represented in the coaching ranks. This causes the Network’s goals to be more than technical competence; it requires sensitivity and a genuine respect for the individual. Through the Network will hold to a non-sectarian model each must demonstrate its support for this human centered ethic. From those of us that have taken the initiative to organize this network, we recognize the varying, and sometimes conflicting interests of an entrepreneurial community and we have committed ourselves to the broader principles of C. S. Lewis’s “friendship”, which states “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival” for guidance in this quest.

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Somewhere I found these step when I misspelled paranoia by spelling  proanoia. Other than the mistake itself, I found the simple turn from drudge to joy a wonderful idea. I hope you enjoy them as much I have.

1. You have license to complain and whine about anything and everything in an intense 15-minute orgy of bitching. Having spewed all your venom in one neat ritual exorcism, you’ll perhaps be free to enjoy sweet moods and broad-minded visions for a while.
2. You locate or create a symbol of your own pain. Mail it to any you want to know you are ending your dependence on their approval.
You then conduct a sacred ritual of purification during which time you will burn that symbol to ash. While this may not banish your suffering entirely, I’m confident it will provide a substantial amelioration which you will be able to feel the benefits of within a month.
3. You eat a pinch of dirt and an edible flower petal while affirming that you are ready to kill off one of your outworn shticks — some idea or formula that has worked for you in the past but has now become a parody of itself.
4. Using crayons, paints, scissors, glue, collage materials or any other materials, you create a piece of large-denomination paper money, good for making a payment on your karmic debt.
5. You kick your own ass 22 times.
6. You take the Smart Optimists’ Personality Test, designed to
reprogram you to ask questions that increase your Pronoia Quotient (PQ).
7. You brag about yourself nonstop for ten minutes. Record it so you can listen back to it later.
8. You perform a senseless act of altruism, for instance by giving an anonymous gift or providing some beauty or healing to a person who cannot do you any favors in return.
9. You deliver a concentrated stream of praise about someone, either to that person herself or to anyone who will listen. Extra credit: You force yourself to think a kind and loving thought about someone you don’t like or feel alienated from.
10. You build an altar devoted to beauty, truth, and love in one of the ugliest places you know.
11. You watch a blank TV while making up a pronoiac story featuring plot twists that are rife with happiness, redemption, and good times — yet not boring. You may either speak this tale aloud or write it down.
12. You perform a ceremony in which you get married to yourself.
13. While making love, you periodically imagine that your physical pleasure is a carrier wave for a spiritual blessing which you beam in the direction of some particular person

A new year, an old hope: engagement. It’s time again to take stock, to say the important things that need saying or at minimum to avoid the trite that matters to no one. Here I have to ask your indulgence – a space, within and without, for restorative Justice. To relive with me the tensions we have shared with the disclosure of my addiction – between the simple exit, to withdraw, and voice, you spoke up regardless.

The balance implied in the common notion of justice calls us to “die” to the rigid walls of separation between us, which pain and fear have wrought upon heart and mind, like barred cages and rusting chains. Not forgetting, but replenishing is what holds us all in awe resisting decay. In the tension, to be open, laid open, exposing our “seed” of Justice hidden within – small and quiet.

Engagement begins on the sly, nuggets of insights shared, warped, and twisted within the deep rich ground of community. It takes root in a hope; however misguided the flesh of the story is continually revealed. It’s the coming-up-short – the dark night of false boundaries – that spawns decay instead of replenishment – that calls for grace. Above ground it trembles.

Be within and without – loyalty may rot, but early on the fruits of past experience were sweet – that the rain of our tears might heal us, binding once more into life engendering new fields of Promise. Full circle, unrepentant, its strength is its resiliency:

• I am with you despite relapses
• You have my respect, even when I fail

During the 1990s, CEOs of most American companies focused on the bottom line with the single goal of creating shareholder wealth. The idea was for CEOs to look tough, act tough, and talk tough. Many of them would not have been caught dead discussing soft stuff like ethics, values, openness, or corporate responsibilities to customers, employees, and host communities, especially to a community of “morally failed addicts”. When the Enron/Andersen scandal broke, followed by a tidal wave of revelations of similar corporate crimes, the initial reactions among American business leaders ranged from deafening silence to “it’s just a few bad apples.” Not many spoke out in condemnation, and even fewer suggested the need for better executive behavior. Fewer still discussed the existential tension they felt because of their many personal roles.

There is something refreshingly old-fashioned, therefore, about Bill George’s Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value (Jossey-Bass, 2003). During the 10 years George was CEO of the medical technology company Medtronic Inc., he practiced a philosophy in which “shareholders come third” — the belief that investors can benefit only as the result of efforts of empowered employees who effectively serve customers. To that end, George promulgated such business values as producing top-quality products, treating employees with respect, and acting with integrity in dealing with all his company’s stakeholders. The bottom line: Medtronic created $60 billion in value on his watch, and investors saw shares appreciate at a compound rate of 32 percent a year.

He writes that the secret to his stewardship was the practice of “authentic leadership,” the traditional approach to running companies that had been the hallmark of such now nearly forgotten CEO s as Max DePree (Herman Miller), Jim Burke (Johnson & Johnson), David Packard (Hewlett-Packard), Ken Dayton (Dayton Hudson), and J. Irwin Miller (Cummins Engine). These are leaders, in George’s words, who were “committed to stewardship of their assets and to making a difference in the lives of the people they serve,” leaders who had “a deep sense of purpose” and who recognized “the importance of their service to society.” So here I am standing in the shadow of such great men, but wanting to use the same title for my own sense of leadership. The first step is to describe the community for which I am standing for as the Principal Consultant and Master Coach. They are addicts of all stripes. So here is some of the features of their lives that I am offering to be in service.

After describing some of the twist and turns of their life I will return to how authenticity is the key for my worthiness to serve.

The Life of an Addict.

Despite their situation an addict uses two tactics to survive: the obsession and the alienated lifestyle.

Tactic one: The obsession-induced altered-state-of-consciousness.

One of the great blessings of being consumed as an addict is that pretty much everything connected with your obsession is interesting. Under the influence of their addiction, an addict can spend hours doing their “thing” regardless of its social significance wither its playing “Buying Gadgets”, “War Craft”, “shopping”, watching grass grow or just being on a corner watching the world go by. The experience of the hustling the next deal is heightened, jokes are funnier, life is more vibrant. And under hallucinogenic drugs, the user is witness to such marvels as the color of music or the sounds of colors.

There are practical benefits of being addicted. Those who are homeless turn, for instance, to stimulants to keep awake: falling asleep often means getting robbed. At a deeper psychological level, David Lensen (1999) reports research that the drug’s appeal for an addicted construction worker or telephone sales representative is that it inspires the worker to find interest in a job that has, while sober, no personal meaning. Without the drug, the worker would be overwhelmed with boredom and quit.

Tactic Two: The alienated lifestyle

The second tactic is the lifestyle. For non-addicts, one of the more baffling dynamics of addiction is the addict’s apparent need to live life at the level of a soap-opera. In my Addicts Prayer, I mentioned the tensions and the walls of separation. “We made mountains out of molehills,” says Narcotics Anonymous (1982, p. 93). Addicts know how to increase intensity of their lives. Relationships are often rancorous facts, thoughts of revenge rival any Hollywood movie, are embellished to make life-stories more interesting. Even a simple flat tire is used by the addict as proof that god, himself, has singled out the addict for punishment.

The Centering Moment

What is the nature of obsession/alienation and how does it effect our basic stand as an authentic leader, which we claimed earlier was so important. An addict’s obsession/alienation is understood as the process whereby they struggle with and against being divorced or isolated so as to conform to the society around them.

The common view of a CEO is that it is limited to one of the following interpretations:

• The first views strategy purely as insight into industry dynamics and customer needs, evaluated on the basis of novelty, distinctiveness, analytical depth, or intellectual elegance — rather than on results achieved, lives changed.
• The second considers strategy as the long view, a step-by-step plan toward a comprehensive vision of a future 15 to 25 years distant — ignoring the reality that timing matters.
• The third views strategy solely as the province of the CEO and the board of directors, which leaves others in the organization to address the grubby details of execution — and fails to mobilize the people who are best equipped to understand emerging opportunities.
• The fourth misconception positions strategy as the first and most important driver of decisions about organization and operations — instead of basing strategy on the company’s core strengths and competencies.

Nowhere does the CEO confront the social meaning of their vision and mission to change lives. Changing lives is left for religious efforts of social workers and others that have no requirement to produce a profit. This is where I am in tune with the addict – my role is also based on alienation in order to be authentic.

In religious terms alienation is corruption to the perfection in history. It is eliminated in that moment when humanity and God are one. My authenticity is summed up in the view on the ends-of-our-work depending on our view of the end of history. The following stand is based in the five categories of H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic “Christ and Culture”, are to some people particular to Christianity but others from other faiths or no particular faith hopefully can gain from these descriptions.

1. For the exclusive Christian history is the story of a rising church or Christian culture and a dying pagan civilization.

2. For the cultural Christian, it is the story of the spirit’s encounter with nature.

3. For the synthesist, it is a period of preparation under law, reason, gospel, and church for an ultimate communion of the soul with God.

4. For the dualist, history is the time of struggle between faith and unbelief, a period between the giving of the promise of life and its fulfillment.

5. For the conversionist history is the story of God’s mighty deeds and of man’s responses to them. He lives some what less “between the times” and somewhat more in the divine “Now” than do my various brothers listed above. Eternity to the conversionist, like me, focuses less on the action of God before time and less the life with God after time and more on the presence of God in time. Hence the conversionist is less concerned with conservation of what has been given in creation, less with preparation for what will be given in a final redemption, than with the divine possibility of a present renewal.

Even to use any view of Christ as justification for addiction treatment requires precise articulation. As stated above, I consider my view most closely defined by the conversionist. Given this confession, I still have to accept being blamed by some antagonists as inducing men to rely on the Grace of God instead of summoning them to human achievement. I stand on, we are responsible, but we do not control.

Others will claim to be baffled by what seems like contempt for present existence with its great concern for existing men, because we are not frighten by the prospect of doom on all man’s works, because we are not despairing but confident.

Then there is the recurring cultural indictment of intolerance, because our speech invites the indignation in its claims of separation from the communion of mankind and in our claims to the exclusive possession of divine knowledge, and our supposed disdaining of every other form of worship except our own as impious and idolatrous. What is often meant is that all claims of religious groups but especially all consideration of the claims of Christ and God should be banished from the spheres where other “gods”, called “values” reign.

Christian exaltation of the lowly offends aristocrats and Nietzcheans in one way, champions of the proletariat and capitalist in another. The unavailability of Christ’s wisdom to the wise and prudent, its attainability by the simple and by babes, bewilder both business and the philosophical leaders of culture or excite their scorn. We are constantly taking hits from all sides and even within the values dialogue.

In general, one encounters two difficulties to understanding how rigorous to hold the authority of an epistemological source, as I hold Jesus Christ.

1. The impossibility of stating adequately by means of concepts and propositions a principle which presents itself in the form of a person: word made flesh.

2. The impossibility of saying anything about this person which is not also relative to the particular standpoint in church, history, and culture of the one undertakes to describe him.

Either one accepts relativity (material realty) or the method of Biblical positivism, pointing to the New Testament and forgoing all interpretation. I admit my tendencies towards the relative. With the ongoing tragedy of having to accept the content of mystery, which I have, that sounds to the positivist as though, I am siding with relativity. Then those to focus on the material see my statements as opiates used head fake the “unlearned”.

I instead focus on what Christ practiced and taught: Love. His was double love, of the neighbor as well as of God, and that His ethics was two foci, “God, the Father, and the infinite value of the human soul. The double commandment, whether originally stated or merely confirmed by Jesus, by no means places God and neighbor on a level, as through complete devolution were due to each. The neighbor is put on the same level of value that the self occupies, the struggle is here. The upside is to strive to moves pass ‘love thy neighbor as thy self” to “love one another as I have loved you.”

The end product for Jesus’ was the Kingdom there his “theory of ethics must come under the conception of replenishment in preparation.” Replenishment is moral renewal in prospect of the accomplishment of universal perfection, the open question does it happen inside or outside of time, but what is sure is its com(ing).

For some corporate “voice” or “governance” is essentially Godless in the purely secular sense, as having neither positive nor negative relation to God of Jesus Christ; for others it is Godless in the negative sense, as being anti-God or idolatrous; for others it seems solidly based on a natural, rational knowledge of God, or His law. However, in the language of organizational behavior one’s ultimate beliefs rarely come in vision of mission statement document. It is also true that my personal demographic, educational and other intrinsic predilections (21st Century) is so inextricably intertwined in how I say what I say about Christ. Hence both explorations suffer: analysis of culture and Christ suffer my lens depiction.

The truth of the space just defined is its deeply mystical, calculating and tactical. It is nearly theological as it generates images of genesis and grace: “authentic leadership”. I believe that what was said of power and strategy could ably fit Howard Thurman’s meditation “Our Minor Absolutes”–the tension of processes against individuals, daring to make a difference.

It is very hard for us to be in Thy presence. There are so many minor absolutes to which we give our strength and our energies that we are embarrassed before Thee….We seek forgiveness, but again and again as we wait in the silence, we do not quite know for what. Perhaps what we really seek is an awareness of sin and failure, shortcomings. Thus we spread these out before Thee. Thy knowest. We would be better than we are, but as we wait in Thy presence we are not sure that we want to be better than we are…..If under the aegis of Thy spirit our lives were changed, we are afraid…of what might become of us. Work over us, knead us, do to us what our spirits require, not that we may be better than we are…but that we may more deeply desire to be better than we are…

As a regular contributor of “Answers” in the Linkedin social networking, leadership and other areas that bare on ethics and philosophy I have to inject my thoughts. This post is a cut and paste job from an essay I wrote for the Sarbanes Oxley Journal last year. My focus is less a matter of generalist or specialist as moralist over functional. Implicitly it is the person that matters more than his or her work experience. The companion essay to this post is my “Authentic Leadership“.

It is the responsibility of leaders to bring about this shift in behavior by having both a vision of integrity for the organization and a strategic plan for ensuring such integrity. This vision must be articulated in a way that is relevant and actionable by employees. A vision that aims too high will not be taken seriously while one that is too pedestrian will not motivate employees.

With the spectacle of court TV to avoid, what should a board of directors use to generate a proper picture? The style (or stance) of leadership the board wants to promote demonstrates a capacity to energize subordinates and the public to believe that the organization has risen above its singular contractual obligations and performs at the level for mutual benefit of civil society and stakeholder.

The principal finding of a McKinsey Quarterly survey of more than 1,000 board members is that having focused for a time on accounting-compliance issues, boards are now determined to play an active role in setting the strategy, assessing the risks, developing the leaders, and monitoring the long-term health of their companies.

At one level, the survey underlines the way the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is holding boards—not only in the United States, but also around the world—more responsible for meeting high standards in reporting and controlling the financial affairs of their companies. Yet the implications for governance are even far more reaching. To achieve as much involvement as directors say they want, they will have to use their time in meetings more effectively and develop a new understanding of their roles and responsibilities; otherwise, they will give management the impression they intend to take on day-to-day roles. Moreover, the composition and culture of boards, as well as the agendas of board meetings, will require fresh thinking.

Understanding and choosing the style of leadership necessary to create the desired environment for the organization begins with understanding the various leadership roles available to organizations today.

 

Leadership as Management: Developed by Friedrich Taylor, this is a managerial role that asks leaders to ensure group activity is timed, controlled, and predictable. This mind-set says little, if anything, about the leadership task of building shared values, trust, and vision. It is silent about the animating essence of business and business people. By relegating workers to the status of “cogs” in the corporate machine, it has scant appeal to the better educated, more aware, and ever-more-wanting people entering the workplace. The need to be rapidly responsive to changes in customer demand for products and services places a strain on the rigid, procedural, control mechanisms developed by this managerial mind-set — to produce traditional outputs with multiple units of the same product to high tolerances and low margins.

 

Leadership as Excellent (good) Management: This view of leadership, while maintaining the mechanistic operational inclination of the firm, changes the character of the core follower (responding to the pull of the quality movement) and enlarges the domain of the manager. Essentially it retains the idea that leaders and managers do much the same thing. It limits the scope of leadership to just one function — quality improvements — and ignores the full range of capacities of both leader and follower. It does not address the needs of the corporation beyond a focus on high quality.

 

Values Leadership: This conception of leadership is rooted in the reality of human nature and conduct. The essential human nature is simple; everyone has values and these values trigger behavior. Even as it recognizes the use and importance of values in shaping behavior, out of a false desire to let each person choose their own values, it refrains from advocating any values or even discussing relative merits of alternative value systems. Indeed, it teaches that any value is equal to any other. So it recognizes that values are shaping our lives but fails to address that we do not know how to consciously set our own values systems or evaluate the merits or results of those we see in others. Values leadership clearly has set aside a space to articulate values but seems too timid and unsure to make full use of the space.

 

Trust Leadership: This view sees its role not so much as a function of the individual leader but as a condition of the group culture. Leadership may be spontaneous at times. Most often, it is a result of specific, planned actions to create a culture conducive to internal harmony and interpersonal trust. The leader’s task is to build a culture of shared values where people can come to trust each other enough to sublimate their differing values so that they can work together. Those accepting this leadership reality see the need for a unified, effective, harmonious culture characterized by mutual trust that allows leadership to take place. It is a collective activity, shaped and controlled by the values-laden notion of harmony as defined by its history of domination by the majority culture. Without a broad and adroit set of critical skills, the trust leader’s search for unity will tend to exclude many important insights, tactics and especially people. This view is likely to accept conformity as consensus or, even worse; it needs conformity and needs to call it consensus.

 

Spiritual Leadership: This view concludes that leadership is a function of the leader’s concern for the whole-soul — the inner sense of spirituality of self and others. The belief is that leadership comes out of the leader’s true self — his/her inner spiritual core. This inner framework, not facts or situation, determines what is good and true and beautiful, and therefore worthy of action. From this view, the notion of only looking at profit and productivity is unsatisfying as the guiding values focus on feeding the soul. It presumes that people are hungry for meaning in their lives and feel lost and empty. To fill this void, it attempts to blend an internal representation of the soul and the firm’s economic needs. This view represents one of the oldest of rationales in Western culture, that of Emanuel Kant. It understates the social value of being the best for an external customer in favor of the inner most space of the internal market — the soul. It may be true that the key operation is metaphysical but to link to a unified soul denies the multiplicity of the forces in action. What this view is especially good at is focusing all of its attention of an empowering relationship. A leader of a metaphysical experience defines a sense of one’s own spirituality and that of co-workers so as to have a greater transformational effect on the organization, its forms, structures and processes.

 

Contextual Leadership: This view is a celebration of “maturity”. Contextualism is a view of life that takes seriously the idea of maturity — a wide base of knowledge and a life filled with challenge. Maturity expresses a commitment to courageously choose to define and protect ones social space in the presence of hostile forces while maintaining an adroit process of self-criticism and accountability for those choices. A wide base of knowledge infers more than a mere accumulation of data but rather an ongoing quest to be conversant with the many discourses and varied articulations they entail. Challenge-filled refers to a belief in a bursting forth of possibilities. This belief in open possibilities, limited by responsibility, explains the relationship between management and contextual leadership. Simply put, contextual leadership calls into question the very core of historical management rationale that emphasize rules, universality, and impartiality over contingent ways of reasoning that emphasize relationships, particularity, and partiality. Most management systems seek to transcend the individual. Contextual leadership delights in the play of unfixedness, incompleteness, and temporality. From this view, the spectacle of the open forum represents the true reality of our time. All other versions of reality that call for the unity, objectivity, or a wholeness of social bodies as presupposed in most management systems, are systems used for domination and repression.

Style Creates Context

Each leadership style brings distinct philosophies and value systems to the practice of operating and leading an organization yet they all fail to address the experience of the leaders themselves. We believe that the keys to effectively leading transformational activities in an organization are first to recognize one’s own leadership style along with its strengths and weaknesses. Second, to identify the likely opportunities and issues created within the organization’s culture and its ability to be transparent and effective in and for society associated with that leadership style. And finally, to develop a point of reference, or “place to stand,” that allows leaders to act with confidence and consistency.

While the activities of transforming the ethical and compliance culture of an organization are important, fundamentally, the approach leaders take to demonstrate integrity and transparency will determine what the real cultural context will be.

It’s Up to You

Your leadership, its style and basis, create the context for the organization and guide the development and evolution of your organization’s culture in powerful and far reaching ways. As leaders, it is easy to become consumed by the day-to-day activities required by our roles within the organization. Meetings, clients, staff, and those we report to, all place demands for time and attention. Without the ability to create space for reflection and purposeful preparation, we simply lead based upon our historical experience of other leaders or, even worse, simply take as a given the historical culture of our organizations. While this may have been adequate in the past, the dynamics and demands of modern social expectations and the heightened expectations of compliance and oversight systems make that approach inadequate for the future. Whether you exercise your leadership as part of a Board of Directors, as a C-level executive, or as a leader responsible for a segment of an organization, you, more than any other person, have the ability to create a powerful context and culture that celebrates transparency, receives and demonstrates trust, and effectively guides employees as they make the myriad daily decisions necessary to grow and evolve your organization. Ultimately, compliance and risk management is a product of the choices made by individuals. Their guide through this minefield of temptations and challenges is the cultural context you have established supported by the policies, practices, and resources available to them